The Alchemy of Happiness: Three Stories and a Hybrid-Essay
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While I was writing the essay, I was talking to Kenny Leck and thinking that maybe I could turn this into a chapbook for his Babette’s Feast chapbook series. But if I was going to do that, I had the feeling that it wasn’t quite done; it was a decent essay, but a certain sort of depth was missing. Then I thought back to the serial flash fiction story “Looking Downward” that I had written already and decided that I might actually be able to intersperse the episodes of that with the non-fiction chapters of the essay. Fortunately, it worked pretty well.
On putting your life out there—not all writers feel comfortable doing the same thing, sort of like putting the private side out. Why did you decide to do that and do you feel like there’s a need for writers to put their own lives out there for public scrutiny in relation to their fiction?
I think it depends on each individual writer. Some people are a lot more comfortable doing that than others, like David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs, who write explicitly about their lives and families. I typically think of myself as a private person and so I took the more memoirish parts of the essay as a challenge. Prior to this, I’d never expected to write any kind of memoir, even though bits of my life creep into my fiction, which can’t be helped; even if a story is not an autobiography, it’s going to be influenced by something I’ve experienced or people I know. But writing autobiographically in a more conscious way, that was unexpected at first. I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to do it, if it was even going to work, if my life had frankly been interesting enough. What do I have to say, who the hell am I? But at the same time, I felt as though certain things had happened at these key events in my life that were very meaningful to me, and maybe they would be meaningful to someone else too.
I also was very conscious that when doing this type of almost confessional writing, that you’re not writing the full truth.
You’re writing your version.
Right. I was worried about whether I would be, intentionally or unintentionally, using rose-colored glasses on these events, so as to make me look good, or come off better than I really did. So I tried to be as honest as I could. It was a challenge thinking about what I could have to say on this subject that would have meaning for other people as well, while at the same time keeping over a hundred teenagers from falling asleep in their seats.
Do you see literature as having a role as being a bit instructional, or a space for reflection?
I think both of those are true, but I’d tend to favor a more reflective role. People in general—but especially a lot of people in Singapore—just don’t reflect enough. I think the problem is that they are not given the time and space.
Maybe intentionally so.
Maybe so, going back to the whole thing about control—that those in charge don’t want you to think too much about things. That you have to work yourself to death to keep earning your money to buy stuff you don’t really need. Even when I was teaching and giving reflection assignments, the mandate was that the students had to reflect on a certain topic, and it was very systematized. You could only reflect in this way.
But unstructured reflection is important for us to think about who we are, and what our place is in the wider world. There were some scientific studies last year, reported in The Guardian, I believe, that regularly reading fiction literally makes you a more empathetic person because it allows you to inhabit another perspective for a short amount of time. And I think this is doubly the case for speculative fiction. You mentioned represented spaces before, and I think that for many people, in such a fast-paced world, the least represented space for many of us is inside our own minds. It’s the be-all and end-all for human experience, and if literature, and speculative fiction in particular, can help me to access and better that space, then I’m never going to stop reading or writing it.
Notes
“Reality, Interrupted” was originally published in slightly different form in The Third Alternative #42 (Summer 2005), and later reprinted at Infinity Plus (January 2006), and in Agua/Cero (Proyecto Líquido, Spanish translation, 2007) edited by Hernán Ortiz and Viviana Trujillo. The story was honorably mentioned in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Nineteenth Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Press, 2006) edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant.
“In Jurong” was originally published in slightly different form in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (Vol. 8, No. 4, October 2009), and later reprinted in Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg (Math Paper Press, 2011; ebook edition from Infinity Plus, 2012).
“Always a Risk” was written for Eastern Heathens (forthcoming), an anthology of fiction inspired by Asian folklore edited by Amanda Lee and Ng Yi-Sheng, and appears here in digital form first.
“Embracing the Strange” will be published as a standalone chapbook by Math Paper Press in March 2013, as part of the Babette’s Feast chapbook series, but appears here in digital form first.
“Represented Spaces: An Interview By Wei Fen Lee” is original to this volume.
About the Author
Jason Erik Lundberg is an American expatriate now living in Singapore, and the author of Red Dot Irreal (2011), The Time Traveler's Son (2008), Four Seasons in One Day (2003, with Janet Chui), and over 80 articles, short stories, and book reviews. He is also the co-editor of A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (2008) and Scattered, Covered, Smothered (2004). His writing has appeared in venues such as Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, the Raleigh News & Observer, Qarrtsiluni, Sybil's Garage, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, The Third Alternative and Electric Velocipede.
Lundberg's short fiction has been nominated for the SLF Fountain Award, shortlisted for the Brenda L. Smart Award for Short Fiction, and honorably mentioned (twice) in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. With his wife, artist-writer Janet Chui, he runs Two Cranes Press, a critically-acclaimed independent publishing atelier. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and holds a degree in creative writing from North Carolina State University.
Discover more works by the author at Jason Lundberg dot Net.